A photography exhibition running at the Sector 17 Underpass Gallery is asking visitors to see damaged landscapes and thriving gardens as part of the same story. Dreaming an Ideal Nature, featuring works of Chandigarh-born, New York-based artist Vasudev Vashisht, pairs images from the open-pit mines of Cerro de Pasco, Peru, with scenes from community gardens in New York, arguing that both are sites where people and land negotiate a relationship of care.Vashisht does not present the two locations as opposites. Instead, he treats them as connected sites where people and land respond to one another. One image in the show, Compost Backdrop, shows a stained cloth hung to dry against a wall of ivy, a quiet study in decay giving way to growth.”Collaboration usually makes us think about working with other people,” Vashisht said. “But I see landscapes as collaborators too. Every place carries its own history, chemistry and agency.”That idea plays out most vividly in a set of images from a children’s workshop in Cerro de Pasco. In one photograph, a group of children release balloons into the sky, only these are packed with native seeds rather than helium alone, turning a simple gesture of play into an ecological act. Related frames from the same session show children rolling and throwing clay seed balls across barren ground, part of a project Vashisht ran with a local non-profit and area schools.While the scars of extraction are visible throughout the show, they are never allowed to be its final word. Vashisht said he wanted the exhibition to move beyond images of environmental damage alone. “Environmental challenges are certainly present in the work, but so are gardens, composting initiatives and people who continue to imagine different futures,” he said. “Those stories of resilience feel just as important to tell.”The exhibition marks Vashisht’s debut solo show and comes the same year he was named the only Indian-origin artist among 17 selected worldwide for NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Program.Vasudev VashishtThe exhibition, organised by the Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi with the Chandigarh Photographers Association, concludes on July 13.